Chapter
Four explores how government and BP crisis management of the BP oil disaster re-inscribed
extractive, mercantile and warlike conceptions of carbon security that violate
fundamental liberal rights of property and personhood. The BP oil crisis was an
inevitable outcome of the dominant extractive and dispossessing logic adopted
by the oil industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the
nineteenth century vulgarity has been tempered and domesticated with
regulations, the extractive and ultimately risk-laden logic continues to be
prioritized by the oil complex and the broader carbon complex more generally.
Government is incapable of authentic reform, because it too is badly captured
by nineteenth century formulations of colonial mercantilism, layered onto a
twenty-first century state dominated by the military industry complex.

We
see the captured regulatory state in the White House collusion with BP to
minimize the extend, scope, and duration of the oil crisis and environmental
effects. Although BP was charged with crimes against the environment, no top
executives were charged individually, no investigation occurred of suspicious
sales of BP stock immediately prior to crisis, and BP was subject to no long-lasting
discipline through severance of government contracting. Restoration efforts
were limited and will not be adequate to address the extent of damage wrought
by the spill upon an already degrading ecosystem. The Gulf of Mexico becomes
more and more contaminated by petrochemicals and the lifestyle and health of
the people within it degrades with little hope of full restoration. Restoration
is simply too costly within the homogenized economic calculus shared by the oil
industry and government regulators across too many levels.

How
can the liberal promises of self-government and the pursuit of happiness survive
when our global economy is dominated by ruthless energy financial and energy
complexes, predator states and the oppositional forces engendered by their
mercantile colonialism? The greatest source of resistance to the western oil
complex identified in Chapter Four comes from the state-owned energy
enterprises that were largely, although not exclusively, institutionalized as
anti-colonial enterprises. Unfortunately, it appears that state enterprises
often simply re-inscribed colonial governing logics and strategies. Moreover, despite
their control over substantial oil supplies, the state enterprises do not
control global commodity markets and still must operate within a neoliberal
global financial system mediated primarily by the US dollar. Efforts to conduct
oil sales in national currencies are underway and may somewhat erode neoliberal
financial hegemony, but replacing one system of centralized and extractive
control for another does not promise ecological improvements, nor the pursuit
of self-governance and happiness.

Neoliberal
financialization has increased the inertia against change that is everywhere
encoded in infrastructures, lifestyles, and politics. Financialization manufactures
value from increasingly abstract underlying phenomena. Abstracted value from
equities, debt, and commodities is traded on global markets, with trades
dominated by the world’s most powerful institutional investors. Owners of the
world’s financial contracts scalp value and dictate industry growth
trajectories globally, producing market volatility in pricing that ultimately increases
costs and narrows choices for end consumers, while externalizing risks from supply
chain hazards to communities. In particular, the added value attached to energy
commodities through their financialization in complex derivatives traded on
commodity exchanges and dark pools contributes to volatility, increases inertia
against change and encourages policy aimed at perpetuating an unsustainable
status quo. The unsustainable status quo entails unremitting escalation of
resource extraction despite known catastrophic risks, even in a context of
dampened demand. For example, efforts underway within the US to allow oil
exports are aimed at increasing profitability while the ecological costs of
“innovative” extractive technologies, including deepwater drilling and
fracking, are externalized to impacted communities and future generations who
face degraded environments. The BP oil disaster was not an isolated case. In
the wake of the fracking boom that swept the US over the last decade,
communities face clean-up of abandoned wells, compromised injection sites, and depleted
and degraded fresh water. The legacy of boom-times gone bad includes
instabilities in financial markets as banks that fueled the financial bubble
and financed industrial expansion when prices and demand were high are now
taking huge losses on loans to tied to energy company losses, as illustrated by
Wells Fargo’s loan charge-off of $122 million in commercial-and-industrial loan
portfolio in 2015, as compared to $67 million in 2014.[i] Wells Fargo reported that
it expected “correlated stress in communities that are dependent upon oil and
gas.” Emerging markets are gauged to be particularly vulnerable to the ongoing
collapse of the mega commodities bubble. One wonders where the hot money is
going now?

Extractive
logics and practices in energy markets are made more dangerous by imperial
governmental deployments to secure supply chains and access to markets.
Escalating violence in the Middle East over oil, natural gas supply lines, and
fresh water is evolving into a proxie war between Russia, Iran, and President
Assad of Syria, on the one hand, and amorphous “rebels,” the US, Japan and
allied western powers, on the other hand. A humanitarian crisis is brewing in
the region that could unleash very dangerous thanatopolitics as Europeans on
the periphery are overwhelmed by refugees.

2 comments:

I love all of your work, but if I may offer some constructive criticism or at least an observation...you use too many "big" words. I know that sounds simplistic, but most readers, even well-educated ones, prefer easy reading.

Even in business, CEO's and management want short power-point presentations which use the simplest words.

Yes, it has gotten that bad out there.

I know that you are highly intelligent, but most people are not. Say things as simply as you can and you will be understood better.

Also, please watch your proof-reading:

For example, this sentence is yours above:

"We see the captured regulatory state in the White House collusion with BP to minimize the extend, scope, and duration of the oil crisis and environmental effects."

Should "extend" be extent ?

I hope you don't mind my observations. It is meant with all due respect.

About Me

I am a Professor at a large public university. I study political economy and biopolitics (the politics of life). My interests are diverse but are broadly concerned with economic, social and environmental justice. I have published 5 books: Crisis Communication, Liberal Democracy and Ecological Sustainability: The Threat of Financial and Energy Complexes in the Twenty-First Century (2016); Fukusima and the Privatization of Risk (2013); Constructing Autism (2005); Governmentality, Biopower and Everyday Life (2008/2011); Governing Childhood (2010).
I also participated in an edited collection on Fukushima: Fukushima: Dispossession or Denuclearization (2014).